As most of you know, I am making dish towels for a friend of mine using Embroidery Library's Kitchen Herb Cameos, found here. I complained about how dense the lavender design was, having had trouble with the flowers.

Today I did what I thought was going to be one of the easiest of all--parsley. After all, it's just some leaves and tiny flowers, right? How wrong was I?! The needle broke; okay, happens occasionally. But then I had more thread breakage on this one design than all the others . Then a huge bird's nest! Why it was decided that the leaves had to be gone over about six or seven times is beyond me! It absolutely tore up my stabilizer.

But I soldiered on! The last straw, however, was when the tiny flowers were stitched--OFF PLACE!! Then I noticed two of the leaves are also off place! Good grief! I certainly can't give this to my friend!

I don't know whether to try again, or just choose a different design. I'm wondering, though, if the others will be any better, especially if they have flowers .

to me this looks like what I call a bar towel, that is a loose weave, and frankly I have not had good luck using them to embroider with any kind of design. The weave is just too lose combined with the loft of the towel spells disaster. If one were determined I suppose starching well, a heavy cut away and maybe... as well as a single hole stitch plate, but my experience has been these type of towels are best left unembroidered. They just have too much give in the fabric.

I know a commercial embroiderer as a casual acquantance that has the professional software many thousands of dollars and full corel and all that jazz. I observed her one day out of curiosity while they were running the machines and she would zoom in on a design area before running it as she would do many items for an order with that design and she said she was looking for those intensive areas to remove the bad spots before a run. She said I don't have down time to waste on trouble like that. We all know what those areas are the machines run really rough and there is a hammering sound where things are bullet proof. She said no one ever misses those stitches as they are all on top of each other in too little space. If I run a dense design I will enlarge it without increasing the stitches but I usually don't know until it is stitched. The older I get the more I do a test on things that cost more than a $ or two sort of like I now make a fit muslin if I am sewing a new pattern. I've heard others say they adjust density on all EL designs. I do think they do better if hooped not stuck down with adhesive but that's my thought. It is really annoying to break needles and all that jazz not to mention ruined projects and damage to the machines.

HMMM - I use Gilette brand Barcloth towels all the time - I just soak them in home made starch first let them almost dry then iron dry - hoop - no other stabilizer the nap by that time is flat as a pancake. With EL designs if it looks dense I buy one size smaller and size it up 10 to 15% I try to use same thread colour top and bottom.

If you happen to have the Floriani software, you could 'run it thru it' to ck stitches etc. Also, since this is a somewhat 'airy' design, if you have a 50 or 60 weight thread, you might try it on a sample of similar fabric.

This isn't a bar towel--it is hucktoweling, no nap. This is the sixth one I've done. The easiest one was the "rosemary" ... no flowers, just stems and leaves .

My software is 4D Embroidery Extra. If someone could explain how to "un-dense" the design I will certainly give it a try . I'm thankful these are a "just-because" gift and not for a special occasion with a deadline . I may never stitch these again!

MoDo, in 4D suite, there is a Design Optimizer module where you can see the design and the density of different areas.The module will remove the extra stitches making the design not as dense and "optimizing" the stitch-out. I don't know whether this is included in Embroidery Extra. Floriani software will do the same. If you have that module in 4D, all you do is open the design in that part of the program, click, and it's done! EL designs tend to be "bulletproof" at times, but I have never had a problem to the extent that you seem to have had. Good luck.

MoDo, I realize this is a problem you want to fix and master, but honestly I still think the towel is beautiful. Unless one does machine embroidery (and very few do), they're not going to look at anything in this design as a mistake but rather a stylized version of this flower. Hope you get it all figured out : )

I embroider on that type towel all the time, like Shirley I starch them as stiff as I can but I just use 2-3 applications of spray starch and I use a medium or light weight tear away stabiliser. And I agree - contact EL. Those are old designs and EL's designs used to be super-dense but now not so much. Now, if you didn't have the towel starched and it got loose from the stabiliser it maybe could have shifted a bit, enough to throw the design off kilter. What a bummer!!! But yeah, I wouldn't give that towel to anybody, either, too many mistakes. I would use it myself, tho.

Another thing with the old EL designs - they used to build up layer upon layer of different shades of thread to give depth to the design, you can easily go in, watch the design stitch out and remove some of those excess layers that don't really make a difference or show anyway.

I have had a similar problem with the last stitches not aligning, but it is usually because a very dense design pulls the fabric in tighter and when you stitch the later stitches, they go in the wrong place. I wonder if a heavy tear-away with a WSS topper would help?? It is very pretty to me and I wouldn't have noticed anything wrong if you didn't point it out. Of course, if I did it, it would bother me, too- we are our own worst critics!

Sometimes you need several layers of stabilizer for a dense design. If you use the mesh-type of stabilizer, lay the first piece of stabilizer vertically and the second one horizontally--so the "grain" goes in different directions and makes for more stability.

_____________________________

KarenVA

"We cannot do great things, we can only do little things with great love." Mother Teresa

Thank you all for responding . I opened the design in my 4D and magnified it up real close; the stitching is not really dense on this design. The mystery may have been solved, though! While at Jo-Ann today, I told my Viking rep about this. She told me that after I removed the hoop to fix the bird's nest, I should have recalibrated the machine. I thought if I did that I'd have to go through all the stitches again, but she said the machine (Designer Diamond) remembers the last stitch of the design you were working on! She said it's probable that if I had recalibrated, then put the hoop back on and clicked on (whatever it was I am supposed to click on ... hmmm) the machine would have gone back to the last stitch and continued on.

So, it would seem the design doesn't match up because the machine was off either after the needle broke, or after the bird's next ... perhaps both. I shall give the design another go and hope for the best . Stay tuned !

That would not have helped if you had a birds nest - what I do is write down the stitch number - remove the hoop and take care of any mess on the bottom - then I back up sometimes you have to back up quite a bit and sometimes the thread is getting caught and pulling the fabric out of perfect alignment so even calibrating might not help because the fabric might have shifted even a minute bit. It wont b e enough to just continue from the last stitch even if the fabric hasn't pulled you would need to back up to take care of all that thread removed from thread nest. My best advise after starching stiff as a board is absolute silence just you and the machine you actually can hear when the thread starts to nest there is an every so faint change of stitching noise of course you have to really know your machine and how it sounds and REACT immediately - stop remove hoop take a peek is everything look ok - sometimes I HEAR something amuck like the sound it makes when the thread is shredding yeah it makes a noise - really really listen

Drats, I just hate it when stuff like this happens! Most people wouldn't notice, but of course you know it is not the way it is supposed to be! I hope that you give it another try and that it stitches out fine and was just the bird's nest problem etc. I had one design, an OESD that ended up partially misaligned... still a mystery how that happened for sure. Stitched it again and it was fine!

Okay, I tried to stitch the parsley design again. I drenched the towel front and back with undiluted liquid starch from a spray bottle. I put medium-weight tear-away stabilizer on the bottom and Sulky WSS on the top (probably didn't need the WSS, but what the heck). Needless to say I was nervous . I had to keep telling myself to breathe! And ...

success . Woohoo!! Six towels down, one to go! I will post a photo of all of them when I finish up tomorrow!